Something in her technique startled me. Out of pure greed, I gave her ridiculous pieces — Busoni, Rubenstein — show pieces and schmaltz I had no stomach for. I knew they’d come back in a few weeks, pulsing as I’d never heard them. Like the Bible translated into the clicks and hums of whales: incomprehensible, alien, but still recognizable. Her fingers invented from scratch the idea of harmonic structure. She listened with them, a safecracker feeling the tumblers through gloves. She stroked the keys as if apologizing to them in advance. But even her lightest touch had the force of a refugee displaced by organized violence.
Every lesson with Cindy Hang left me feeling criminal. “I’ve got nothing to teach her,” I told Teresa. Saying even that much was a mistake.
“Oh, I bet there’s all sorts of things you can teach her.”
Her voice fell into a note it never sounded. But I refused to be baited. “Anything I teach her will destroy what she does. She has the most amazing touch.”
“Touch?” Like I’d hit her.
“Ter. Sweetie. The girl is only seventeen.”
“Exactly.” Her voice clutched tight to nothing.
Things got worse. After Cindy’s lessons, I felt Teresa straining for the ordinary. She’d ask, “How’d it go?” And I’d answer just as casually, “Not bad.” I had a lengthy mental list of pieces I couldn’t assign the girl— Liebesträume, the Moonlight, “Prelude to a Kiss,” any Fantasie. All the while, Cindy Hang worked harder and played more dazedly, no doubt wondering why the better she performed, the more remote her teacher became.
I had felt no desire for the child until Teresa suggested it. Then, in the smallest, deniable increments, she grew to consume me. I’d meet her nightly in my dreams, the two of us thrown together in some mass wartime deportation, reading each other’s needs without the weight of earthbound speech. I dressed her in navy blue, a midcalf dress with wide shoulders, now four decades out of date. Everything was right, except the hair, which curled in my dreams. I’d put my ear to that brown ravine beneath her clavicle, the one I saw in waking, while she sat upright on the bench, playing for me. When I touched my ear to her skin, the blood coursing underneath it sounded like chant.
Cindy Hang’s skin was perfect — that nonaligned brown belonging to half the human race. I loved the girl for her vulnerability, her total bewilderment at where she’d landed, the tentative attempts at recovery in her fingers’ every probe. I loved how she sounded, as if she’d come from another planet — something this planet would never house. I told myself for weeks there was no problem. But I wanted something from Cindy Hang, something I didn’t even know I wanted until Teresa’s jealousy pointed it out to me.
We played together, Mozart’s D Major Sonata for piano four hands, Köchel 381. I assigned the piece just to allow me to sit by her on the piano bench. There are only four profound measures in the piece; the rest is mostly note spinning. But I looked forward to it as to nothing else in my life. It brought me back da capo, to where I’d started. We played the middle movement together, a little slower than it should go. She took the upper part and I supported her. My lines were full and broad. Hers were the lightest exploration, like a bird foraging. I felt I was striding through a crowded fairgrounds with a happy child on my shoulders.
One lesson, we played it perfectly. Under our fingers, the modest little piece completed what it was meant to do in this life. We finished playing, my pupil and I both aware of what we’d just done. Cindy kept still on the bench next to me, head down, looking at the keys, waiting for me to touch her. When I didn’t, she looked up, her mouth a crooked smile, desperate to please. “We can try it again? From the beginning?”
I called her father. I told him that Cindy was extremely talented, “a real musician,” but that she’d outgrown everything I was able to teach her. I could help him find someone who’d move her forward. In fact, I felt secretly sure any other teacher would kill all that was strangest and most luminous in her playing. That scumbled virtuosity of the nonnative speaker wouldn’t survive her first real lesson. But whatever another teacher might do to her was better than what I would, if she studied with me another week.
Cindy’s father was too confused to object. “Would you like to talk to her? Explain this to her yourself?”
I must have said something absurd, because I can’t remember it. I got off the line without talking to her. For months afterward, I said nothing to Teresa. My telling her would only confirm her fears. When I told her at last, she was truly miserable, all the misery that only truth can bring. She dragged around for two weeks, trying to fix things. “Maybe you should give up teaching, Joseph. You haven’t worked on your own music since you started.”
I stopped dreaming of Cindy Hang, except for that strange, surgical otherworldliness of her playing. In her hands, the long lines of Europe became something they’d never recognized in themselves. I never heard the likes of her sound again. Alone of all my students, the girl might have learned to make music at will. But the way she played would have had to die, on the way to any real stage.
Banishing Cindy brought Terrie and me closer for a while, if only in shared guilt. Teresa had given up more to live with me than I could ever repay. I carried that fact around with me like a prison record. I grew daily more certain that she couldn’t afford to be with me. She wanted to devote herself to someone who’d devoted himself to the thing she loved most in all the world. She wanted to marry a musician. It was that simple. She wanted me to marry her. She thought that signing the papers, making it official, would destroy our perpetual anxiety and bring down all walls. He’s my husband, she could explain to the venomous cashiers, to the men who followed us down the street, threatening, to the police cars tracking our public movements. He’s my husband, she’d say, and they’d have no comeback.
Sometimes at night, stirred by our closeness in the dark, she brought it up in whispers. She painted a fantasy for me, a house, a sovereign state of our own with its own flag and national anthem, perhaps a growing populace. I never objected, and in the dark, she took my willing listening as assent.
With the future in limbo between us, my ability to make music do anything fell almost to zero. The world away from the keyboard was even worse. Running the vacuum for half an hour exhausted me. A trip to the grocery store swelled into an expedition to scale Everest. Maybe we ought to marry, I thought. Marry and move to someplace survivable. But I didn’t know how. If Teresa just took care of everything, handled all the mechanics, told me when it was over…
Inert, I figured that the odds of my dying before having to act on anything like an implied promise would eventually grow overwhelming. I was over thirty, the age beyond which no one was to be trusted. Teresa closed in on the same landmark, the age beyond which an unmarried woman probably never would be. It should have seemed natural to me. It was what I’d grown up knowing: a spouse of each color. But a quarter of a century had beaten the natural out of me. All my family’s lessons had reduced to one: No one marries outside their race and lives.
Teresa thought of me as half white. We sang together, and never had a problem. She thought she recognized me. She saw me working away, trying to write white music. Everything I kept from her allowed her to go on thinking as much. Once she asked about my father’s family. She wanted something to attach to. “Where are they from?”
“Germany.”
“I know that, goof. Where in Germany?”